What were the ideas behind Atatürk's engine of change? And, how did he stitch them together to create a modern society in Turkey? M. ükrü Hanioglu probes the bold and pragmatic mind of Atatürk in his new book, “Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography” (Princeton University Press, 2011)Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) was a colossus among twentieth-century statesmen. As the founder of the Turkish Republic and its first President, Atatürk transformed his country with sweeping political, social and economic reforms. M. ?ükrü Hanio?lu is the Garrett Professor in Foreign Affairs and Professor and Chair of the Near East Studies Department at Princeton University. He was educated at Istanbul University. He is the author of “Young Turks in Opposition” (Oxford, 1995) and “A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire” (Princeton, 2008). In his new book, Hanio?lu provides us with a fresh way to look at Atatürk. The path to understanding the mind of Atatürk should begin with this book. It reveals a complex and remarkable man, who shaped the history of Turkey and the world. Professor Hanio?lu discusses his new book with Saudi Gazette. What sparked your interest in Atatürk? As a scholar specializing in late Ottoman and early modern Turkish intellectual history, I find writing an intellectual biography of the founder of modern Turkey both necessary and challenging. Atatürk attempted one of the greatest societal transformations of modern times. Not only as a statesman, but also as a self-made thinker, he invested remarkable energy in preparing the intellectual groundwork for a momentous project aimed at building a utopian state. He was the individual who transformed an intellectual utopia into a political program to produce a new society contradicting the reality from which it sprang. The roots of modern Turkey cannot be understood without a thorough examination of his intellectual leanings. What problems do historians encounter in writing about Atatürk? The quasi-religious personality cult that surrounded Atatürk during his lifetime and afterward renders dealing with the subject extremely difficult. Thus a historian wishing to work on the various aspects of Atatürk's life and thought has to engage primarily in demythologizing, historicizing, and contextualizing through the use of unsanitized material. This seems easy on paper but is a daunting enterprise in real terms. Turkish historiography views him as a maker of history and a sagelike dispenser of wisdom who was impervious to his upbringing, socialization, and intellectual environment. Thus seeking the historical Atatürk and presenting him as an intellectual and social product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is likely to be controversial for mainstream history writing in Turkey. What did you discover about Atatürk from his diaries and notebooks? In my opinion, the passages that he underlined or marked and the notes he jotted down on the margins of the books that he read reveal much more about his deeper intellectual leanings and proclivities than his diaries and notebooks. I benefitted from them tremendously in uncovering the intellectual roots of his ideas. They also disclose that he took many of his ideas from European popular theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His diaries and notebooks yield a different kind of information. They help us better understand his personal views on various subjects and the topics that attracted his interest. What impact did Atatürk have on the Muslim world? He introduced a new option to the Muslim world. A society pushing religion to the background, basing itself on a strong scientistic-nationalist ideology, and propagating an indivisible civilization was not something never entertained by pundits in the Muslim world. Nevertheless for a new state composed predominantly of Muslims to adopt these tenets as its main pillars was very much a novelty in the Islamic world. Atatürk further attempted to transform Islam through reforms into a system fully embracing modernity. A large number of intellectuals and some Muslim statesmen such as Habib Bourguiba in Tunis were deeply influenced by Atatürk's program and attempted to emulate it in their own societies. They scored fewer successes, however. What was Atatürk's greatest political achievement? His greatest political achievement was building a nation-state that almost totally rejected its past and traditions. He was not the initiator of this vision, but he translated this utopia envisaged by a group of marginal intellectuals of the late Ottoman Empire into reality. Given the wrenching character of this program for a predominantly Muslim society of the early twentieth century, transforming this vision into a state ideology was a major political achievement. Introducing the pugnacious secularism of the French Third Republic as a fundamental tenet of his new nation-state and its official ideology was another major political achievement on his part.
